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The Last Place on Earth

Peter Sansom

The Last Place on Earth by Peter Sansom
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2006)
9781857548853
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • we walked up to school although we knew the school
    was closed, a day of sledging on baking trays,
    and Spike the Snowman with his dog, Snowy.
    The butcher crunched with us the short cut
    late and later for work through the little park
    and got trapped by his childhood -

        from 'That was the day it snowed'

    The Last Place on Earth is a warm, witty celebration of the textures of a life. The vanishing world of a working-class childhood is evoked alongside football in the park and the purposeful calm of ironing; family parties and born-again bikers, jokes about fruit and the silent beauty of Sheffield on a summer night, its shops lit up like deserted cruise ships. Peter Sansom has an eye for what is distinctive in the mundane, an understanding of the power of half-submerged memories to bind us to people and places. Above all, his poems honour the quiet pleasures that give meaning to life, affirming the depths of ordinary happiness.
    Peter Sansom was born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. Carcanet published his first book in 1990. Among more recent titles are Selected Poems and Careful What You Wish For, which won him a Cholmondeley Award in 2016. He has also published Writing Poems (Bloodaxe, 1994, new edition 2024). For ten years ... read more
    'A serious intelligence only lightly disguised as self-mockery and expressed via devastatingly clear-sighted observation.'
    Yorkshire Post
    'His writing gains its vitality from the tension between the desire to remember and the necessity of moving on.'
    Poetry Review
    'A congenial writer, whose usually informal metrical sense is, nevertheless, decisive and intuitively informed.'
    Times Literary Supplement
    Praise for Peter Sansom  'Long-suppressed anger morphs into characteristic deadpan humour, a difficult trick to accomplish without appearing trite - while he's no formalist, Sansom is as highly-skilled as any contemporary poet. Peter Sansom's poetry... is full of gentle, bittersweet and funny moments, the work of a poet and person whose outlook on life is immensely engaging, engaged and likeable.'

    Matthew Paul, The Friday Poem

    'Personal, political, powerful'
    Morning Star 
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